At a glance, the N22 road between Killarney and Cork looks pretty ordinary.
But one small stretch of this route has become a recurring headache for the local council.
More than once in recent years the road has suffered a dip at a spot on the outskirts of Killarney, near Glenflesk, and despite a bill of around £40,000 and much engineering brain-power, the problem was still vexing experts at the start of August 2017.
So, When Kerry politician Danny Healy-Rae stood up to offer his answer , everyone was all ears...
“Fairies.”
Although some may have thought Healy-Rae had reached this solution after a few pints of Guinness , he was in fact referring to age-old reverence for peculiar fairy-haunted parts of the Irish landscape.
For all the derision which Healy-Rae’s response has provoked, his views would have made good sense in Celtic fairy territory around 100 years ago.
The real fairies, a very far cry from the prettified versions seen in Disney’s Tinkerbell or Cinderella's godmother, were dangerous.
At very worst, they could kill you. ‘Killer fairies caused four deaths’ ran the headlines of several British dailies in November 2006.
The deaths were not recent. A list of causes of death from the parish records of Lamplugh in Cumbria stated that four people had been ‘frighted to death by fairies’ in the period 1656-1663.
Bizarrely enough, the claim may well have been true. Many other British people really were frightened to death by their belief in witches or ghosts, right down to the late Victorian age.
A bit less drastically, fairies were the first point of blame for just about anything bad in your household or village, from sickness through to crop failure.
In the early twentieth century one old man stated that fairies had caused the devastating Irish famine of 1846-7.
Most of all, fairies liked to steal children. When they did, they would leave a ‘fairy changeling’ in its place.
Throughout the nineteenth century a startling number of parents across Britain and Ireland ritually abused their own children so that the fairies would reverse this swap.
In reality, many of the supposed changelings were suffering from inherited genetic disorders. These could make them look or behave oddly, and the fact that such conditions predominate among males of Irish or English descent supported the belief that fairies liked to steal boys in particular.
Having said that, one fairy kidnap in Donegal sounded eerily real. When applying for a pension in 1909, elderly Annie McIntire could not recall her exact age, but did know one thing: as a child, she had been stolen by the fairies on Halloween, 1839.
Luckily, her brother was passing, saw the elfin child-thieves dancing round Annie in the wood, and managed to rescue her by flinging a book at them.
In a world where every child was raised in terror of fairies, the idea of filling your kid’s bedroom with fairy fun and magic would have been very strange indeed.
No less serious was the risk of angering fairies by encroaching on their territory. Healy-Rae implied that the Killarney road problem was linked to the many fairy forts in this area, whilst Irish folklore expert Eddie Lenihan presently wondered if there was an invisible fairy path linking two fairy forts, and crossing the road at the afflicted spot.
Along with forts (often Iron Age hill forts) and paths, the third danger spot was Fairy Trees.
In Athlone, Westmeath in 1911, labourer John Seery vacated his cottage, erected on a fairy fort, because the site was ‘haunted by fairies’, prompting local Councillor Molloy to admit that: ‘no luck ever came out of interfering with such places’.
In early 1912 another man, Kilduff, refused the council’s offer to build him a cottage over the county border in Lackan, Wicklow, because the plot had a fort on it, and ‘on no account would he interfere with “the fairies’ home”’.If fairy trees were anything to go by, these two had good reason to be afraid.
In County Antrim in 1938 people still recalled the man who had recklessly cut down a fairy tree when drunk one night.
Next morning he got out of bed to find that his head was facing backwards, as if in some out-take from The Exorcist.
In other cases interference with fairy trees was held to be the cause of mysterious deaths. But one case especially echoes the current problems on the N22 road.
In spring 1905 the Daily Mail reported: ‘as soon as earth is dumped into a ravine near Ballintra to make a bed for the new Donegal and Ballyshannon railway, it disappears down the hillside’. Why? A fairy thorn tree had ‘been removed to make way for the track, and local opinion lays the difficulty at the door of the angry fairies.’Fairy saboteurs did not go away in a hurry.
In late 1951 ‘workmen employed by Limerick Corporation to build 475 houses refused to clear the mound on the site because it was a fairy fort’.
Echoing Healy-Rae, who has said he would rather starve than damage a fairy fort, Limerick City Mayor Matthew Macken declared: ‘if I have to get a gun to defend the fort’ from the bulldozers, ‘I will certainly do it’.
Corporation overseer John McNamara claimed that ‘several members of the bulldozer crew said they saw leprechauns making shoes there’; and when replacement labourers came in and ‘built a few house gables … next morning not one of the gables was standing’.
The result was that thirty of the proposed houses went unbuilt.
In 1999 a fairy tree threatened by a new motorway bypass at Ennis, County Clare, was saved after warnings by Eddie Lenihan. Was he right?
A few years later, in 2007, he could point to the repeated mysterious toppling of new electricity poles installed dangerously close to a fairy fort in Sooey, County Sligo.
In 2015 the BBC reported on the powerful fairy thorn located on the green of Ormeau Golf Club in Belfast.
Greenkeepers would not dare to so much as trim this tree, whilst golfers who struck it without apologising were plagued with bad luck for the remainder of their game.
Fairy paths were no less perilous. Around 1910 elderly John Boylin recalled how, during his Kilmessan childhood in County Meath, he and other kids were subject to a Fairy Curfew each evening.
A fairy procession was known to march at this time from the fort at Ringlestown, circling fairy bushes near Boylin’s house, and everyone must be safely indoors before this occurred.
One man who broke the curfew was later found dead. Some time before 1895 a farmer’s family living near Mitchelstown, County Cork, moved out of a house built on a fairy track, after two of the family had died.
It is very clear that fairies were made scapegoats for ordinary, though misunderstood sicknesses or deaths.
But there remain a handful of fairy disturbances which look very much like genuine paranormal activity – or, in a word, poltergeists. What on earth is it that causes these sudden household outbursts, with their hammering noises and inexplicable flinging about of objects and furniture?
Mind-bending as all this is, it actually does seem to happen. As recently as August 2016, two sets of police witnessed it when called into a poltergeist house at Rutherglen in Glasgow.Faced with something as crazy as a poltergeist, fairies are as good an explanation as any (and arguably better than no explanation at all).
And so, when a Northern Ireland farmhouse was attacked by poltergeists in 1907, locals held that ‘fairies caused the problem, as the farmer had swept his chimney with a bough of holly’ – and the holly was, as any fool knew… a fairy tree.
In Portarlington, Queen’s County, a man spent £500 building his new house on ‘what was reputed to be a fairy path’.
On his very first night inside, ‘strange noises were made; chairs, beds, and dishes began to move, at first gently, then with more violence, until at the end of an hour everything was smashed and the man himself was very seriously hurt’.
The man lost all his savings when he abandoned the house, which was still empty in 1915.
One particular nuisance of fairy paths was that, unlike well-known trees and forts, they were not always spotted until it was too late.
Some time before 1959, Paddy Baine and his bride, Biddy Callan, moved into a new house near the Ox Mountains in County Sligo.
Presently (wrote Diarmuid Macmanus), ‘they began to experience very frequent disturbances at one end of it which abutted on the little village road.
Some nights it appeared as if the whole house was about to tumble down’.
A local wisewoman explained that one corner of the house was blocking a fairy path. Paddy had a stonemason cut off the offending corner, and the problems apparently ceased.
The researcher Paul Devereux confirms that many houses in the West of Ireland were modified for this kind of reason.
It may just have been a happy coincidence that Baine’s poltergeist went quiet after the corner of the house was sliced off.
Some such incidents stop for no obvious reason after a few days or even hours. But there is also a lot of evidence to show that poltergeist outbreaks feed on fear and stress. If this negative energy can be banished, the problems can stop.
So – in some cases people had good reason to be afraid of the supernatural; and appeasing the fairies could also be genuinely useful.
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